“Unquiet souls
Risen from the grave, to ease the heavy guilt
Of deeds in life concealed.”--AKENSIDE.
[Sidenote: THE CHURCHYARD GHOST.]
Of all the wilder beliefs of our forefathers, there is none which so
truly continues to exist as the belief in the churchyard spectre.
Treat it as we may, it has assuredly a fast hold of our nature. We
may conceal, but we cannot smother it;--we may deny it as pointedly
as the lackey does his master when the visitor is an unwelcome one,
but it is not from that circumstance a whit the less at home. True or
false, too, it seems to act no unimportant part in the moral economy of
the world. For without a deeper sense of religion to set in its place
than most people entertain, men would be greatly the worse for wanting
it. There are superstitions which perform, in some measure, the work
of the devotional sentiment, when the latter is either undeveloped
or misdirected; and the superstition of the churchyard ghost is
unquestionably one of the number.
[Sidenote: MY WRITING-ROOM.]
I am fortunate, so far as the sympathy of place can have any influence
on the mind, in the little antique room in which I have set myself to
illustrate the belief. Just look round you for one brief minute, and
see how the little narrow windows rise into the thatch, and how very
profoundly one requires to stoop ere one can enter by the door. The
ceiling rises far into the roof. There is a deep recess in the wall
occupied by a few pieces of old china, and a set of shelves laden
with old books; and only see how abruptly the hearth-stone rises
over the sanded floor, and how well the fashion of yonder old oaken
table agrees with that of the old oaken scrutoire in the opposite
corner. Humble as my apartment may seem, it is a place of some little
experience in the affairs of both this world and the other. It has
seen three entire generations come into being and pass away, and it
now shelters the scion of a fourth. It has been a frequent scene of
christenings, bridals, and lykewakes--of the joys and sorrows, the
cares and solicitudes of humble life. Nor were these all. There is the
identical door at which it is said a great-grand-aunt of the writer
saw a sheeted spectre looking in upon her as she lay a-bed; and there
the window at which another and nearer relative was sitting in a
stormy winter evening, thinking of her husband far at sea, when, after
a dismal gust had howled over the roof, the flapping of a sail and
the cry of distress were heard, and she wrung her hands in anguish,
convinced that her sailor had perished. And so indeed it was. Strange
voices have echoed from the adjoining apartment; the sounds of an
unknown foot have been heard traversing its floor; and I have only to
descend the stair ere I stand on the place where a shadowy dissevered
hand was once seen beckoning on one of the inmates. How incalculably
numerous must such stories have once been, when the history of one
little domicile furnishes so many?
[Sidenote: THE BROKEN PROMISE.]
About sixteen years ago, I accompanied an elderly relative--now,
alas! no more--on a journey through the parishes of Nigg, Fearn, and
Tarbat. He was a shrewd, clear-headed man, of great warmth of heart,
who continued to bear a balmy atmosphere of the enthusiasm of early
youth about him, despite of the hard-earned experience of fifty-five.
There could not be a more delightful companion even to a boy. I never
knew one half so well acquainted with the traditionary history of the
country. Every hamlet we passed, almost every green mound, had its
story; and there was that happy mixture of point and simplicity in
his style of narrative, which almost every one knows how to admire,
and scarcely one of a thousand how to imitate. He had, I suspect, a
good deal of the sceptic in his composition, and regarded his ghost
stories rather as the machinery of a sort of domestic poetry than as
pieces of real history; but then, no one could value them more as
curious illustrations of human belief, or show less of the coldness
of infidelity in his mode of telling them. “Yonder lofty ridge,” said
he, as we passed along, “is the hill of Nigg, so famous, you know,
as a hunting-place of the Fions. Were we on the other side, where it
overhangs the sea, I could point out to you the remains of a cottage
that has an old ghost story connected with it--a story that dates, I
believe, some time in the early days of your grandmother. Two young
girls, who had grown up together from the days of their childhood,
and were mutually attached, had gone to the lykewake of a female
acquaintance, a poor orphan, and found some women employed in dressing
the body. There was an indifference and even light-heartedness shown
on the occasion that shocked the two friends; and they solemnly
agreed before parting, that should one of them outlive the other, the
survivor, and no one besides, should lay out the corpse of the departed
for the grave. The feeling, however, passed with the occasion out of
which it arose, and the mutual promise was forgotten, until several
years after, when one of the girls, then the mistress of a solitary
farmhouse on the hill of Nigg, was informed one morning, by a chance
passenger, that her old companion, who had become the wife of a farmer
in the neighbouring parish of Fearn, had died in childbed during the
previous night. She called to mind her promise, but it was only to
reflect how impossible it was for her to fulfill it. She had her infant
to tend, and no one to intrust it to--her maid having left her scarcely
an hour before for a neighbouring fair, to which her husband and his
ploughman had also gone. She spent an anxious day, and it was with no
ordinary solicitude, as she saw the evening gradually darkening, and
thought of her promise and her deceased companion, that she went out
to a little hillock beside the house, which commanded a view of the
moor over which her husband and the servants had to pass on their way
from the fair, to ascertain whether any of them were yet returning.
At length she could discern through the deepening twilight, a female
figure in white coming along the moor, and supposing it to be the
maid, and unwilling to appear so anxious for her return, she went into
the house. The outer apartment, as was customary at the period, was
occupied as a cow-house; some of the animals were in their stalls,
and on their beginning to snort and stamp as if disturbed by some one
passing, the woman half turned her to the door. What, however, was her
astonishment to see, instead of the maid, a tall figure wrapped up
from head to foot in a winding-sheet! It passed round to the opposite
side of the fire, where there was a chair drawn in for the farmer, and
seating itself, raised its thin chalky arms and uncovered its face.
The features, as shown by the flame, were those of the deceased woman;
and it was with an expression of anger, which added to the horror of
the appearance, that the dead and glassy eyes were turned to her old
companion, who, shrinking with a terror that seemed to annihilate
every feeling and faculty except the anxious solicitude of the mother,
strained her child to her bosom, and gazed as if fascinated on the
terrible apparition before her. She could see every fold of the sheet;
the black hair seemed to droop carelessly over the forehead; the livid,
unbreathing lips were drawn apart, as if no friendly hand had closed
them after the last agony; and the reflection of the flame seemed to
rise and fall within the eyes--varying by its ceaseless flicker the
statue-like fixedness of the features. As the fire began to decay,
the woman recovered enough of her self-possession to stretch her hand
behind her, and draw from time to time out of the child’s cradle a
handful of straw, which she flung on the embers; but she had lost all
reckoning of time, and could only guess at the duration of the visit
by finding the straw nearly expended. She was looking forward with a
still deepening horror to being left in darkness with the spectre, when
voices were heard in the yard without. The apparition glided towards
the door; the cattle began to snort and stamp, as on its entrance;
and one of them struck at it with its feet in the passing; when it
uttered a faint shriek and disappeared. The farmer entered the cottage
a moment after, barely in time to see his wife fall over in a swoon on
the floor, and to receive the child. Next morning, says the story, the
woman attended the lykewake, to fulfil all of her engagement that she
yet could; and on examining the body, discovered that, by a strange
sympathy, the mark of a cow’s hoof was distinctly impressed on its left
side.”
[Sidenote: THE POLANDER.]
We passed onwards, and paused for a few seconds where the parish of
Nigg borders on that of Fearn, beside an old hawthorn hedge and a few
green mounds. “And here,” said my companion, “is the scene of another
ghost story, that made some noise in its day; but it is now more than
a century old, and the details are but imperfectly preserved. You
have read, in Johnson’s Life of Denham, that Charles II., during his
exile in France, succeeded in procuring a contribution of ten thousand
pounds from the Scotch that at that time wandered as itinerant traders
over Poland. The old hedge beside you, and the few green mounds beyond
it, once formed the dwelling-house and garden fence of one of these
Polish traders, who had returned in old age to his native country,
possessed, as all supposed, of very considerable wealth. He was known
to the country folk as the ‘Rich Polander.’ On his death, however,
which took place suddenly, his strong-box was found to contain only a
wall, bequeathing to his various relations large sums that were vested,
no one knew where. Some were of opinion that he had lent money to a
considerable amount to one or two neighbouring proprietors; and some
had heard him speak of a brother in Poland, with whom he had left the
greater part of his capital, and who had been robbed and murdered by
banditti, somewhere on the frontier territories, when on his return
to Scotland. In the middle of these surmisings, however, the Polander
himself returned, as if to settle the point. The field there to the
right, in front of the ruins, was at that time laid out as a lawn;
there was a gate in the eastern corner, and another in the west; and
there ran between them a road that passed the front of the house. And
almost every evening the apparition of the Polander, for years after
his decease, walked along that road. It came invariably from the east,
lingered long in front of the building, and then, gliding towards
the west, disappeared in passing through the gateway. But no one had
courage enough to meet with it, or address it; and till this day the
legacies of the Polander remain unpaid. I was acquainted in my younger
days with a very old man, who has assured me that he repeatedly saw
the apparition when on its twilight peregrinations along the road; and
once as he lay a-bed in the morning in his mother’s cottage, long after
the sun had risen. There was a broad stream of light falling through
an opening in the roof, athwart the grey and mottled darkness of the
interior, and the apparition stood partly in the light, partly in the
shadow. The richly-embroidered waistcoat, white cravat, and small
clothes of crimson velvet, were distinctly visible; but he could see
only the faint glitter of the laced hat and of the broad shoe-buckles;
and though the thin withered hands were clearly defined, the features
were wholly invisible.”
[Sidenote: THE ONE-EYED STEPMOTHER.]
We had now entered the parish of Fearn. “And here,” continued my
companion, as we approached the abbey, “is the scene of two other
ghost stories, both, like the last, somewhat meagre in their details,
but they may serve to show how, in a rude and lawless age, the cause
of manners and of morals must have found no inefficient ally in a
deeply-seated belief in the supernatural. A farmer of the parish, who
had just buried his wife, had gone on the evening of the funeral to
pay his addresses to a young woman who lived in a cottage beside the
burying-ground yonder. There was, it would seem, little of delicacy
on either side; and his suit proved so acceptable, that shortly
after nightfall he had his new mistress seated on his knee. They
were laughing and joking together beside a window that opened to the
churchyard, when the mother of the young girl entered the apartment,
and, shocked by their levity, reminded him that the corpse of the woman
so lately deceased lay in all the entireness and almost all the warmth
of life not forty yards from where they sat. ‘No, no, mother,’ said
the man; ‘entire she may be, but she was cold enough in all conscience
before we laid her there.’ He turned round as he spoke, and saw his
deceased wife looking in upon him through the window. And returning
home, he took to his bed, and died of a brain fever only a fortnight
after. Depend on’t, that widowers in this part of the country would be
less hasty ever after in courting their second wives.
“The cottage higher up the hill--that one with the roof nearly gone,
and the old elm beside it--was occupied about sixty years ago by a
farmer of the parish and a harsh-tempered one-eyed woman, his wife.
He had a son and daughter, the children of a former marriage, who
found the dame a very stepmother. The boy was in but his fifth, the
daughter in but her seventh year; and yet the latter was shrewd enough
to remark on one occasion, when beaten by the woman for transferring
a little bit of leaven from the baking-trough to her mouth, that her
second mother could see better with her one eye than her first mother
with her two. The deceased, an industrious housewife, had left behind
her large store of blankets and bed-linen; but the bed of the two
children for the summer and autumn after the marriage of their father,
was covered by only a few worn-out rags, and when the winter set in,
the poor things had to lie in one another’s arms for the early part of
every night shuddering with cold. For a week together, however, they
were found every morning closely wrapt up in some of their mother’s
best blankets. The stepdame stormed, and threatened, and replaced the
blankets in a large store-chest, furnished with lock and hasp; but it
was all in vain--they were found, notwithstanding, each morning on the
children’s bed regularly as the morning came; and the poor things,
though threatened and beaten, could give no other account of the
matter than that they had been very cold when they fell asleep, and
warm and comfortable when they awoke. At length, however, the girl was
enabled to explain the circumstance in a manner that had the effect
of tempering the severity of the stepmother all her life after. Her
brother had fallen asleep, she said, but _she_ was afraid, and could
not sleep; she was, besides, very cold, and so she lay awoke till near
the middle of the night, when the door opened, and there entered a lady
all dressed in white. The fire was blazing brightly, and she could
see as clearly as by day the large chest lying locked in the corner;
but when the lady went to it the hasp flew open, and she took out the
blankets and wrapt them carefully round her brother and herself in the
bed. The lady then kissed her brother, and was going to kiss her too,
when she looked up in her face, and saw it was her first mother. And
then she went away without opening the door.
[Sidenote: THE PEDLAR.]
“I remember another ghost story,” continued my companion, “the scene
of which I shall point out to you when we have entered the parish of
Tarbat. There is a little muddy lake in the upper part of the parish
which almost dries up in the warmer seasons, and on the further edge
of which we shall be able to trace the remains of what was once a
farmhouse. Considerably more than a century ago, a young man who
travelled the country as a packman suddenly disappeared, no one knew
how; and several years after, in a dry summer, which reduced the lake
to less than half its usual size, there was found a human skeleton
among the mud and rushes at the bottom. Long ere the discovery,
however, the farmhouse was haunted by a restless, mischievous spectre,
wrapped up in a grey plaid. Like most murdered folk of those days, the
pedlar walked, restricting his appearance, however, to the interior
of the cottage, which at length came to be deserted; and falling into
decay, it lay for the greater part of a half century as a roofless
grass-covered ruin. Its old inmates had died off in extreme penury and
wretchedness, and both they and the pedlar were nearly forgotten, when
a young man, no way related to either, availing himself of the site of
the cottage and the portions of its broken walls which still remained,
rebuilt it when on the eve of his marriage, and removed to it with
his young wife. On the third evening, when all the wedding guests had
returned to their respective homes, the young couple were disturbed by
strange noises in an adjoining room, and shortly after the door of the
apartment fell open, and there entered a figure wrapped up in a grey
plaid. ‘Who are you?’ said the man, leaping out of bed and stretching
forth his arms to grapple with the figure. ‘The unhappy pedlar,’
replied the spectre, stepping backwards, ‘who was murdered sixty years
ago in this very room, and his body thrown into the loch below. But I
shall trouble you no more. The murderer has gone to his place, and in
two short hours the permitted time of my wanderings on earth shall be
over; for had I escaped the cruel knife, I would have died in my bed
this evening a greyheaded old man.’ It disappeared as it spoke; and
from that night was never more seen nor heard by the inmates of the
farmhouse.” According to Hogg--
“Certain it is, from that day to this,
The ghaist of the pedlar was never mair seen.”
It seems curious enough that such a story should have been received
for many years as true in a district of country in which the people
hold, as strict Calvinists, that no man, however sudden or violent his
death, can die before his appointed time. It may, however, belong to
a somewhat remoter period than that assigned to it--some time in the
early half of the last century--and may have originated in the age
of the curates, whose theology is understood to have been Arminian.
Another of my companion’s stories, communicated on this occasion, had
its scene laid in a district of country full sixty miles away.
[Sidenote: THE GREEN LADY.]
The wife of a Banffshire proprietor, of the minor class, had been about
six months dead, when one of her husband’s ploughmen, returning on
horseback from the smithy in the twilight of an autumn evening, was
accosted, on the banks of a small stream, by a stranger lady, tall and
slim, and wholly attired in green, with her face wrapped up in the hood
of her mantle--who requested to be taken up behind him on the horse,
and carried across. There was something in the tones of her voice that
seemed to thrill through his very bones, and to insinuate itself in the
form of a chill fluid between his skull and the scalp. The request,
too, seemed a strange one; for the rivulet was small and low, and could
present no serious bar to the progress of the most timid traveller. But
the man, unwilling ungallantly to disoblige a lady, turned his horse
to the bank, and she sprang up lightly behind him. She was, however,
a personage that could be better seen than felt; and came in contact
with the ploughman’s back, he said, as if she had been an ill-filled
sack of wool. And when, on reaching the opposite side of the streamlet,
she leaped down as lightly as she had mounted, and he turned fearfully
round to catch a second glimpse of her, it was in the conviction
that she was a creature considerably less earthly in her texture
than himself. She opened with two pale, thin arms, the enveloping
hood, exhibiting a face equally pale and thin, which seemed marked,
however, by the roguish, half-humorous expression of one who had just
succeeded in playing off a good joke. “My dead mistress!” exclaimed the
ploughman. “Yes, John, _your mistress_,” replied the ghost. “But ride
home, my bonny man, for it’s growing late; you and I will be better
acquainted erelong.” John accordingly rode home, and told his story.
Next evening, about the same hour, as two of the laird’s servant-maids
were engaged in washing in an out-house, there came a slight tap to
the door. “Come in,” said one of the maids; and the lady entered,
dressed, as on the previous night, in green. She swept past them to
the inner part of the washing-room; and seating herself on a low
bench, from which, ere her death, she used occasionally to superintend
their employment, she began to question them, as if still in the body,
about the progress of their work. The girls, however, were greatly too
frightened to reply. She then visited an old woman who had nursed the
laird, and to whom she used to show, ere her departure, considerably
more kindness than her husband. And she now seemed as much interested
in her welfare as ever. She inquired whether the laird was kind to her;
and, looking round her little smoky cottage, regretted she should be so
indifferently lodged, and that her cupboard, which was rather of the
emptiest at the time, should not be more amply furnished. For nearly
a twelvemonth after, scarce a day passed in which she was not seen by
some of the domestics--never, however, except on one occasion, after
the sun had risen, or before it had set. The maids could see her in the
grey of the morning flitting like a shadow round their beds, or peering
in upon them at night through the dark window-panes, or at half-open
doors. In the evening she would glide into the kitchen or some of the
out-houses--one of the most familiar and least dignified of her class
that ever held intercourse with mankind--and inquire of the girls
how they had been employed during the day; often, however, without
obtaining an answer, though from a different cause from that which
had at first tied their tongues. For they had become so regardless of
her presence, viewing her simply as a troublesome mistress who had no
longer any claim to be heeded, that when she entered, and they had
dropped their conversation, under the impression that their visitor
was a creature of flesh and blood like themselves, they would again
resume it, remarking that the entrant was “only the green lady.” Though
always cadaverously pale and miserable-looking, she affected a joyous
disposition, and was frequently heard to laugh, even when invisible.
At one time, when provoked by the studied silence of a servant girl,
she flung a pillow at her head, which the girl caught up and returned;
at another, she presented her first acquaintance, the ploughman, with
what seemed to be a handful of silver coin, which he transferred to
his pocket, but which, on hearing her laugh immediately after she
had disappeared, he drew out again, and found to be merely a handful
of slate-shivers. On yet another occasion, the man, when passing on
horseback through a clump of wood, was repeatedly struck from behind
the trees by little pellets of turf; and, on riding into the thicket,
he found that his assailant was the green lady. To her husband she
never appeared; but he frequently heard the tones of her voice echoing
from the lower apartments, and the faint peal of her cold unnatural
laugh.
One day at noon, a year after her first appearance, the old nurse was
surprised to see her enter the cottage, as all her previous visits had
been made early in the morning or late in the evening; whereas now,
though the day was dark and lowering, and a storm of wind and rain had
just broken out, still it _was_ day. “Mammie!” she said, “I cannot
open the heart of the laird, and I have nothing of my own to give you;
but I think I can do something for you now. Go straight to the White
House [that of a neighbouring proprietor], and tell the folk there to
set out, with all the speed of man and horse, for the black rock at
the foot of the crags, or they’ll rue it dearly to their dying day.
Their bairns, foolish things, have gone out to the rock, and the sea
has flowed round them; and if no help reach them soon, they’ll be all
scattered like seaware on the shore ere the fall of the tide. But if
you go and tell your story at the White House, mammie, the bairns will
be safe for an hour to come; and there will be something done by their
mother to better you, for the news.” The woman went as directed, and
told her story; and the father of the children set out on horseback
in hot haste for the rock--a low, insulated skerry, which, lying on
a solitary part of the beach, far below the line of flood, was shut
out from the view of the inhabited country by a wall of precipices,
and covered every tide by several feet of water. On reaching the edge
of the cliffs, he saw the black rock, as the woman had described,
surrounded by the sea, and the children clinging to its higher crags.
But, though the waves were fast rising, his attempts to ride out
through the surf to the poor little things were frustrated by their
cries, which so frightened his horse as to render it unmanageable; and
so he had to gallop on to the nearest fishing village for a boat. So
much time was unavoidably lost, in consequence, that nearly the whole
beach was covered by the sea, and the surf had begun to lash the feet
of the precipices behind; but, until the boat arrived, not a single
wave dashed over the black rock; though immediately after the last of
the children had been rescued, an immense wreath of foam rose twice a
man’s height over its topmost pinnacle.
The old nurse, on her return to the cottage, found the green lady
sitting beside the fire. “Mammie,” she said, “you have made friends to
yourself to-day, who will be kinder to you than your foster-son. I must
now leave you: my time is out, and you’ll be all left to yourselves;
but I’ll have no rest, mammie, for many a twelvemonth to come. Ten
years ago a travelling pedlar broke into our garden in the fruit
season, and I sent out our old ploughman, who is now in Ireland, to
drive him away. It was on a Sunday, and everybody else was in church.
The men struggled and fought, and the pedlar was killed. But though I
at first thought of bringing the case before the laird, when I saw
the dead man’s pack with its silks and its velvets, and this unhappy
piece of green satin (shaking her dress), my foolish heart beguiled me,
and I bade the ploughman bury the pedlar’s body under our ash-tree, in
the corner of our garden, and we divided his goods and money between
us. You must bid the laird raise his bones, and carry them to the
churchyard; and the gold, which you will find in the little _bole_
under the tapestry in my room, must be sent to a poor old widow, the
pedlar’s mother, who lives on the shore of Leith. I must now away
to Ireland to the ploughman; and I’ll be e’en less welcome to him,
mammie, than at the laird’s; but the hungry blood cries loud against us
both--him and me--and we must suffer together. Take care you look not
after me till I have passed the knowe.” She glided away as she spoke in
a gleam of light; and when the old woman had withdrawn her hand from
her eyes, dazzled by the sudden brightness, she saw only a large black
greyhound crossing the moor. And the green lady was never afterwards
seen in Scotland. But the little hoard of gold pieces, stored in a
concealed recess of her former apartment, and the mouldering remains
of the pedlar under the ash-tree, gave evidence to the truth of her
narrative.
[Sidenote: MUNRO THE POST.]
I shall present the reader with one other story under this head--a
ghost story of the more frightful class; which, though not at all
inexplicable on natural principles, has as many marks of authenticity
about it as any of the kind I am acquainted with. For many years the
Cromarty Post-office, which, from the peninsular situation of the
place, lies considerably out of the line of the mail, was connected
with Inverness by a brace of pedestrian postmen, who divided the road
between them into two stages; the last, or Cromarty stage, commencing
at Fortrose. The post who, about half a century ago, travelled over
this terminal stage six times every week was an elderly Highlander
of the clan Munro--a staid, grave-featured man, somewhat tinged, it
was said, by the constitutional melancholy of his country-folk, and
not a little influenced by their peculiar beliefs. He had set out
for Fortrose on his way home one evening, when he was overtaken by
two acquaintances--the one a miller of Resolis, the other a tacksman
of the parish of Cromarty--both considerably in liquor, and loud and
angry in dispute. One of the Fortrose fairs had been held that day;
and they had quarrelled in driving a bargain. Saunders Munro strove to
pacify them, but to little purpose--they bickered idly on with drunken
pertinacity; and it was with no little anxiety that, as they reached
the Burn of Rosemarkie, where the White-bog and Scarfs-craig roads part
company, he saw them pause for a moment, as if to determine their route
homewards. The miller was a tall athletic Highlander; the tacksman
a compact, nervous man, not above the middle size, but resolute and
strongly built. He could scarce, however, be deemed a full match for
the Highlander; and under some such impression, old Saunders, unluckily
as it proved, laid hold of him as he stood hesitating. “You must not
go by that White-bog road,” he said; “it is the near road for the
miller, but not for you; you must come with me by the Scarfs-craig.”
“No, Saunders,” said the tacksman; “I know what you mean; you do not
like that I should cross the Maolbuie moor with the miller; but, big
as he is, he’ll be bigger yet or he daunt me; and I’ll just go by
the White-bog road to show him that.” “Hoot, man,” replied Saunders,
“I’m no thinking o’ that at all; I’m just no very weel to-night, and
would be the better for your company; and so ye’ll come hame this way
with me.” “Not a foot,” doggedly rejoined the tacksman; and, shaking
off the old man, he took the White-bog road with the miller. Saunders
stood gazing anxiously after them as they descended the precipitous
sides of the burn, until a jutting crag hid them from his sight. And
for the rest of the evening, when pursuing his journey homewards, he
felt burdened by an overpowering anxiety, which, disproportioned as it
seemed to the occasion, he could not shake off.
The tacksman reached his home in less than two hours after he had
parted from old Saunders; but two full days elapsed ere any one heard
of the miller. In the evening of the second day, two young girls, the
miller’s sisters, who, after many fruitless inquiries regarding him,
had at length come to learn in whose company he had quitted the fair,
called at the farmhouse, and found the tacksman sitting moodily beside
the fire. He started up, however, as one of them addressed him, and
seemed strangely confused on being asked where he had parted from their
brother. “I do not remember,” he said, “being with your brother at all;
and yet, now that I think of it, we must surely have left Rosemarkie
together. The truth is, we had both rather too much drink in our heads.
But I have some remembrance of passing the Grey Cairn in his company;
and--and;--but--I must surely have left him at the Grey Cairn.” “It
must be ill with my brother,” exclaimed one of the girls, “if he be
still at the Grey Cairn!” “In truth,” replied the tacksman, “I cannot
well say where we parted, or whether I did not leave him at Rosemarkie
with old Saunders Munro the post.”
The evening was by this time merging into night, but the two terrified
girls set out for the cairn; and the tacksman, taking down his bonnet,
seemed as if he purposed accompanying them. On reaching, however, the
outer wall of his yard, he stood for a few seconds as if undecided, and
then, turning fairly round, left them to proceed alone. They entered
one of the blind pathways that go winding in every direction through
the long heath of the Maolbuie--a bleak, desolate, tumulus-mottled
moor--the scene in some remote age of a battle unrecorded by the
historian; and its grey cairn, a vast accumulation of lichened stone,
is said to cover, as I have already stated in an early chapter, the
grave of a Pictish monarch, who, with half his army, perished in the
fray. They reached the cairn; but all was silent, save that a chill
breeze was moaning through the interstices of the shapeless pile, and
sullenly waving the few fir seedlings that skirt its base; and they
had turned to leave the spot, when they were startled by the howling
of a dog a few hundred yards away. There was a dolorous wildness blent
with an ominous familiarity in the sounds, that smote upon their
hearts; and they struck out into the moor in the direction whence they
proceeded, convinced that they were at length to learn the worst. On
coming up to the animal, they found it standing beside the dead body
of its master, their brother. The corpse was examined next morning by
some of the neighbouring farmers; but nothing could be conclusively
determined respecting the manner in which the unfortunate man had met
his death. The neckcloth seemed straitened, and the folds somewhat
compressed, as if it had been grasped by the hand; but then the throat
and neck were scarce at all discoloured, nor were the features more
distorted than if the death had been a natural one. The heath and
mosses, too, in which the body had half sunk, rose as unbroken on every
side of it as if they had never been pressed by the foot. There was no
interference of the magistrate in the case, nor examination of parties.
The body was conveyed to the churchyard and buried; and a little pile
of moor-stones, erected by the herd-boys who tend their cattle on the
moor, continued to mark, when I last passed the way, the spot where it
had been found.
One evening, a few weeks after the interment, as old Saunders the
postman was coming slowly down upon the town of Cromarty through the
dark Navity woods, his eye caught a tall figure coming up behind him,
and mistaking it in the uncertain light for an acquaintance, a farmer,
he paused for a moment by the wayside, and placed his hand almost
mechanically on the ready snuff-box. What, however, was his horror and
astonishment to find, that what he had mistaken for his acquaintance
the farmer was the dead miller of Resolis, attired, as was the wont of
the deceased when in holiday trim, in the Highland costume. He could
see, scarce less distinctly than when he had parted from him at the
Burn of Rosemarkie, the chequers of the tartan and the scarlet of the
gay hose garter, and--a circumstance I have never known omitted in any
edition of the story--the glimmer of the large brass pin which fastened
the kilt at the waist. For an instant Saunders felt as if rooted to
the spot; and then starting forward he hurried homewards, half beside
himself with a terror that seemed to obliterate every idea of space
and time, but collected enough to remark that the spectre kept close
beside him, taking step for step with him as he went, until, at the
gate of a burying-ground immediately over the town, it disappeared. On
the following evening, when again passing through the Navity woods,
nervous with the recollection of the previous night’s adventure, he was
startled by a rustling in the bushes; a shadowy figure came gliding
out from among them to the middle of the road, and he found himself
a second time in the presence of the spectre, which accompanied him,
as before, to the gate of the burying-ground. He contrived on the day
after to leave Fortrose at so early an hour, that he had reached the
outer skirts of the town of Cromarty as the sun was setting; but on
crossing the street to his own house, the spectre started up beside him
in the clear twilight, and, regarding him with an expression of grieved
anxiety, disappeared as he entered the door. An aunt of the writer, who
had occasion to call at his house on this evening, found him in bed in
a corner of the sitting-room of his domicile, and on inquiring whether
he was ill, was informed by his wife, who sat beside him, the cause of
his indisposition.
On his next day’s journey, Saunders, instead of following his usual
road, struck, on his return, across the fields in the direction of a
wooded ravine, which, forming part of the pleasure-grounds of Cromarty
House, bears the name of the Ladies’ Walk. The evening was cloudless
and bright; and the sun had but just disappeared behind the hill,
when he entered the wooded hollow and crossed the little stream which
runs along its bottom. But on rising along the opposite acclivity,
he found that the apparition of the dead miller, true to him as his
shadow, was climbing the hill by his side; and where the path becomes
so narrow--bounded on the one side by a steep descending bank, and
on the other by a line of flowering shrubs--that two can hardly walk
abreast, it glided onwards through the bushes as lightly as a column of
smoke, not a leaf stirring as it passed. On reaching the broken wall
which separates the pleasure-grounds from the old parish-churchyard,
it stood, and, as Saunders was stepping over the fence, spoke for the
first time. “Stop, Saunders,” it said, “I must speak to you.” “I have
neither faith nor strength,” replied Saunders, hurrying away, “to speak
to the like of you.”
The minister of the parish at the time was a gentleman of strong
good sense and a liberal tone of mind; and when the old man waited
on him in the course of the evening, and imparted to him his story,
he questioned him regarding the state of his nerves and stomach, and
gave him an advice which very considerably resembled the prescription
of a physician. But though it might be the best possible in the
circumstances, it wholly failed to satisfy Saunders; and so he
unburdened his mind on the matter to one of the elders of the parish,
a worthy sensible Udoll farmer, a high specimen of the class well
known in the north country as “the Men,” who, considerably advanced in
life, had formed his beliefs at an earlier period than his minister,
and was not in the least disposed to treat the case medicinally. He
arranged with Saunders a meeting for the following evening at the hill
of Eathie, a few miles from his journey’s end; and at Eathie they
accordingly met, and passed on through the Navity woods together. But
though it was late and long ere they reached town, the details of what
befell them by the way they never communicated to any one. Saunders
Munro, however, did not again see the apparition, though he travelled
for years after at all hours of the day and night. The elder, when
rallied regarding the story by a town’s-man whom I well knew, and who
related the circumstance to me, looked him full in the face, and, with
an expression of severe gravity, “bade him never select that subject
for a joke again.” “Young man,” he said, “it was no joking business!”
No one, however, evinced so deep an anxiety on the subject of the
miller’s ghost, and its supposed interview with the elder, as the
suspected tacksman. It is known that on one occasion he placed himself
in the elder’s way when the latter was returning from a funeral, and
solicited a few minutes’ private conversation with him; but was sternly
repelled. “You can have but one business with me,” the elder said;
“and, if your conscience be clear from blood, not one itself.” Whatever
hand the tacksman may have had in the miller’s death, no one who knew
him, or the circumstances in which he had parted on the fatal night
from old Saunders, could regard him as a murderer; though few real
murderers ever wore out life in greater apparent unhappiness than he.
He never after held up his head, but went about his ordinary labours
dejected and spiritless, and invincibly taciturn; and, some few years
subsequent to the event, he fell into a lingering illness, of which
he died. Were one _making_ a ghost story, it would be no difficult
matter to make a more satisfactory one. Never was there a ghost that
appeared to less purpose than that of the miller, or was less fortunate
in securing a publisher for its secret; but sure I am, never was there
a ghost story more firmly believed in the immediate scene of it, or
narrated with greater truth-like minuteness of detail, or with less
suspicion of at least the _honesty_ of the parties on whose testimony
it rested. Nor was it without its effect in adding strength, within the
sphere of its influence, to the fence set around the sacred tabernacle
of the human soul. Where such stories are credited, the violent
spilling of man’s life is never regarded as merely “the diverting of a
little red puddle from its source.”